We’ve had the chance to explore a large collection of YOCaml features, but there’s still so much more! In this final section, we’ll suggest a few ideas for improvements to encourage you to use YOCaml for all your statically generated sites!

Going Further

As mentioned in the subjective highlights, the goal of YOCaml is to provide efficient and composable tools for building a website generator perfectly tailored to the user’s needs. That’s why the standard YOCaml distribution does not include any bundles for quickly creating a site. The first simple step you could take is to customize the templates we used or, even better, rewrite your entire site from scratch, giving free rein to your imagination and ambitions!

Publishing Your Site

In this guide, we haven’t covered deployment at all. This is mainly because, often (except when generating a site in a Git repository), the artifacts are generated in a directory (in our tutorial, _www), making deployment trivial. You simply need to move the contents of the directory to your server.

If you want to use GitHub Pages to deploy your site, the actions-gh-pages action is well documented. You can find an example of deployment here, which was used to deploy this manual.

Code Organization

For simplicity, we implemented our generator entirely in the blog.ml file. An obvious improvement would be to reorganize your binary into multiple modules.

Documentation

The YOCaml documentation is quite extensive, but since you’ve followed this tutorial, you should now be more familiar with the concepts involved, making it easier to navigate. We encourage you to explore it for alternative explanations of what we’ve covered and to find new ideas for possible implementations!

Specific Tutorials

In addition to the documentation, you’ll find specific tutorials in the sidebar that cover particular aspects of YOCaml. We encourage you to explore them to become increasingly proficient!

Improvements

Even though a project can always be improved, some aspects were intentionally left aside to keep this tutorial simple. For example, while we praised YOCaml’s minimalism, we realize that articles are still traversed and parsed three times:

• To build each page dedicated to an article
• To create the index
• To generate the ATOM feed

In practice, this is far from a problem, because, let’s be honest, reaching a writing frequency high enough for parsing articles three times to become an issue is quite ambitious.

However, during our iterations and batches, we mainly used the Batch.iter_files action. If you check the Batch module, you’ll quickly see there are many alternatives. For example, when traversing the articles, you could use fold_files to maintain the list of articles just once, and then use it to build both the index and the feed.

Conclusion

The tutorial is coming to an end! We hope it has motivated you to seriously use YOCaml to build your own website, because we believe this is very important for a diverse web. Additionally, from our perspective, maintaining your own website is an interesting and useful exercise.

YOCaml’s API is extensive yet designed to be modular, allowing you to build a site generator generically that perfectly fits your needs. While this requires a small investment in writing code, it ultimately simplifies your workflow.

Please don’t hesitate to give us feedback on how to improve this tutorial, the YOCaml API, or to request additional tutorials. We are very receptive to suggestions and always happy to receive feedback.